Week Two: Pianist, pedagogue and new music guru Bruce Brubaker takes the curatorial reins for June

Monday, June 13, 2011

Few pianists have proven themselves to be more programmatically inventive and musically provocative than this month's Hammered! pianist-in-residence, Bruce Brubaker. Open your ears all June for a month's worth of programs specially curated for Q2 by one of today's most intriguing contemporary artists.

In each of Brubaker's four week-long programs, the distinguished concert pianist, New England Conservatory faculty member and new music Jedi examines a series of endlessly fascinating themes and offers 1,200 minutes of music that is almost entirely new to Q2.

Each week will include a hosted Monday show and program note from Brubaker, and we'll also offer exclusive music videos recorded live by Brubaker of works by Philip Glass and John Cage.

Tune in all month for what promises to be an illuminating, sometimes quirky and altogether fascinating dive into the curatorial mind of Bruce Brubaker.

A drone could be a bee in a hive, or a missile! Or drones can be long held tones in music, giving it grounding—giving it a steady context against which change occurs. Part of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony has a drone in it, and so does the long beginning of Richard Wagner’s epic Das Rheingold.

There are drones in folk music, in a lot of folk music, and in Sonic Youth. There’s dronescape and dronology. Instruments like the bagpipes, hurdy-gurdy, or sitar are built to produce drones all the time they’re being played.

So what’s so appealing about drones? Composer Nico Muhly says that when he was a kid and heard the steady hum of the vacuum cleaner he liked to sing along!

On Hammered! this week, we “Drone.” We hear real drones in piano music by William Duckworth and Nico Muhly, and more figurative drones too. There’s a new recording of Tom Johnson’s An Hour for Piano, and iconic intonations from La Monte Young—from his Well-Tuned Piano, once but no longer deemed by the Guinness Book of World Records to be the longest piece of piano music.

Exclusive Q2 Video: John Cage's TV Köln, performed by Bruce Brubaker

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Comments [2]

Ryan Carr

Oh man, this was such gold to stumble into...I LOVE Bruce Brubaker, especially his interpretations of Glass pieces, and to hear him pick and play others; couldn't be happier.As of right now, I'm a dedicated follower of this website.....Oh man, there's Nico Muhly next on the horizon, life is good.

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As of September 1, 2014, Hammered! is on hiatus.

Say hello to Hammered!, Q2 Music's hour-long, weekday program devoted the extraordinary breadth and ever-evolving repertoire of music for keyboard. From concert grand to disklavier, synthesizer to clavichord, prepared piano to toy piano, Hammered! shares musical colors from ebony to ivory and every shade in between.